The Cuban Spy Connection

An American female intelligence analyst was convicted in March of spying for Cuba for 16 years

In September 11, the entire U.S. defense and intelligence establishment was put on
high alert. Ships at sea went to "zip lip" status, meaning they ceased radio
communications for fear of giving away their location. The Air Force began flying cover over U.S.
territory. The uncertainty of the source of the attacks and whether more were
coming meant that everyone had to be ready and all measures needed to be taken to
maintain security.

However, one security breach wasn't closed for another 10 days, a lapse that
puzzled many intelligence community sources. The FBI waited that long before
arresting suspected Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes. She was a 45-year-old senior
analyst on Cuba for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a group of more than 7,000 military and civilian employees worldwide who provide
foreign military intelligence for the Department of Defense.

In a criminal complaint, the United States accused Montes of being a spy for Cuba.
Her spying qualifies as one of the highest-level penetrations in the history of the
DIA. On March 19, Montes pleaded guilty to one count of
conspiracy to commit espionage, a charge that could have carried the death penalty,
but in return for leniency, she agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities. The
court hearing revealed that she had spied for Cuba since beginning work at the DIA
in 1985. The prosecutor, assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Walutes Jr., reading the
original indictment, said, "Montes used her position as an intelligence officer,
and subsequently a senior intelligence analyst … to gather writings, documents,
materials and information, classified for reasons of national security, for
unlawful communication, delivery and transmission to the government of Cuba."

Montes was unavailable for comment after the plea hearing, but her lawyer, Plato
Cacheris, told reporters that "she engaged in these activities because of her
belief that U.S. policy does not afford Cubans respect, tolerance and
understanding. She was motivated by her desire to help the Cuban people, and did
not receive any compensation." Cacheris told Cigar Aficionado that "she took the 25
year sentence because if they tried it and we lost, she could have gotten life plus
40 years. The case would have been difficult for us to win." But he went on to say
that the government "in order to learn the full extent of her activities, they had
to make the deal. Otherwise, we weren't going to let her be debriefed." He declined
to speculate further about her motivation.

But what remains clear is that in the wake of September 11, intelligence officials
couldn't help but wonder to what extent Montes and other Cuban spies still at large
could have compromised the national security of the United States. At the very
least, her position in the DIA, and the information she had access to there,
finally convinced counter-intelligence agents in the United States that it was too
risky to allow her to remain in place at the DIA.

After tailing her beginning in May 2001, federal agents arrested Montes on
September 21 in her DIA office at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Later
that day, Walutes, the assistant U.S. Attorney, told the U.S. District Court in
Washington that Montes "knowingly compromised national defense information" and
claimed that Montes had harmed the United States. The affidavit supporting the
complaint and arrest of Montes was filed by Special Agent Steven A. McCoy, a
veteran of the FBI's counterintelligence unit and an expert on Cuban espionage. In
the final plea agreement, Montes admitted to also revealing the identity of four
U.S. agents to the Cuban Government. All four agents, according to U.S. Attorney
Roscoe Howard are "alive and safe."

The original affidavit asserts that Montes committed two particularly egregious
acts against the national security of the country. First, she had been passing
details "about a particular top-secret Special Access Program (SAP) related to the
national defense of the United States" to her Cuban handlers, at least one of whom
was an official based in New York at Cuba's mission to the United Nations,
according to U.S. investigators. SAPs usually have to do with either technical
(satellite) or human intelligence gathering operations, to which few people are
given access. In this case, as Montes seemed to brag to her Cuban handlers, "[J]ust
today the agency made me enter into a program, 'special access top secret.' [First
name, last name omitted from this application] and I are the only ones in my office
who know about the program."

Second, Montes revealed the identity of a U.S. intelligence officer "who was
present in an undercover capacity in Cuba," according to the original affidavit.
The Cubans did not arrest the U.S. spy, but Cuban sources explained that the agent
was identified and fed bad information. The affidavit seems to confirm that, saying
that Cuba was "able to direct its counterintelligence resources" against the U.S.
agent. "We were waiting here for him with open arms," the affidavit states,
revealing a message from Cuba to Montes that was deleted but recovered from the
hard drive of Montes' computer.

Affidavits are usually the most informative documents that ever become public in
many spy cases. The government is often not interested in having a full trial,
because information that could potentially compromise intelligence activities might
have to be presented. That's why, as in the case of FBI mole Robert Hanssen, deals
are made that might seem lenient, but they are made to protect ongoing operations.
(Hanssen, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent who was arrested for spying for
the old Soviet Union, monitored how the United States checked up on suspected Cuban
agents and passed along that information to his KGB handlers.)

The public evidence against Montes was based largely on material found during at
least two searches by federal agents of her Washington apartment. It included
information about "the identities of foreign espionage agents" and "espionage
paraphernalia, including devices designed to conceal and transmit national defense
and classified intelligence information and material." The agents discovered more
than 50 computer diskettes, and later found messages still on the hard drive of
Montes' computer that had been "deleted." Among them, the FBI asserted, was a
message from Montes' Cuban handlers at the Cuban Intelligence Services, or CuIS,
according to the affidavit. The FBI stated that the instructions on the message
duplicate the known methods by which Cuban agents have communicated with the CuIS,
"by making calls to a pager number from a pay telephone booth and entering a
pre-assigned code to convey a particular message." Montes was directed to
communicate with beepers in the 917 area code. That's New York—where Cuba's mission
to the United Nations is located. The recovered message from the CuIS on Montes'
hard drive, according to the affidavit, listed three beeper numbers with codes. The
message tells Montes to be cautious using one of the devices, "because this beeper
is public, in other words it is known to belong to the Cuban Mission at the UN and
we assume there is some control over it. You may use this beeper only in the event
you cannot communicate" with the other two secure beepers. FBI agent McCoy
explained in the affidavit that "control over it" means the CuIS officer suspects
that the FBI "is aware that this beeper number is associated with the Cuban
government and is monitoring it in some fashion."

Between May and September of 2001, the FBI "maintained
periodic physical surveillance" of Montes. Much of what the evidence reveals has to
do with phone calls to the above-mentioned beepers. The surveillance intensified
after September 11. On September 14, Montes was observed at the National Zoo making
"what telephone records confirmed to be two calls to the same pager number she had
called in May, June and August …" On September 15, "Montes made a call to the same
pager number 11:12 a.m. that lasted one minute." On September 16, Montes "made a
brief telephone call from a payphone in the Metro station at approximately 1:50
p.m., again to the same pager number." Five days later, Montes was picked up.

According to The Washington Post, Van A. Harp, the assistant director in charge of
the FBI's Washington field office, said, "This has been a very important
investigation because it does show that our national defense information is still
being targeted by the Cuban intelligence service."

"There has not been what is called an 'assessment of damage' of what she [Montes]
might have known and been able to compromise by making it available to the
Cubans,'' Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chairs the Senate
Intelligence Committee, told The Miami Herald. "The offense that she committed is a
capital offense,'' Graham added, explaining that Montes might reveal the extent of
her activities in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty which
appeared to be her motivation in accepting the plea agreement.

There's also a question of how does a young woman raised in Baltimore get to be a
spy for Cuba. Ana Belen Montes was born on February 28, 1957, on a U.S. military
base in Nurnberg, Germany. Her father was a psychologist on the base; he died more
than a year ago. The official details are sketchy, but the family moved back to the
United States during Montes' childhood and settled for a time in Baltimore. She
graduated from the University of Virginia and attended Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., where she received a
master's degree in 1988.

"We're trying to reconstruct who her friends were, and we can't," Riordan Roett,
director of Western Hemisphere studies at SAIS, told the Herald. "I took a look at
her transcript and she took two of my classes." Roett only vaguely remembered
Montes.

"She was not a particularly engaging person," recalls Rand Corp. analyst Edward
Gonzalez, professor emeritus at UCLA. "She was not happy. She never smiled."
Gonzalez has written studies on Cuba for the U.S. military and intelligence
establishment and would often run into Montes at military and professional
conferences.

Montes began her career at the DIA as a junior analyst in 1985. She concentrated
mainly on matters dealing with Central America. In a published report in late
September, her supervisor at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
described Montes as introverted. "She was very private," the supervisor said. "She
never attended parties. When we had office parties, she might show up for only a
little while."

The Defense Intelligence Agency's mission and its charter is to "provide military
intelligence to war fighters, defense policymakers and force planners, in the
Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, in support of U.S. military
planning and operations and weapon systems acquisition." Perhaps the most serious
harm Montes caused came from how she used her position at the DIA to influence the
way Cuba was perceived. Montes was described by sources in the intelligence
community as "the go-to person on Cuba," and she would routinely brief military
officers at the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. As a senior intelligence analyst,
she visited Cuba at least twice, most recently in 1998.

In the mid-1990s, Montes would have been in a position to pass along "detailed
analysis," former White House officials say, of what the United States was
considering as a response to the shootdown in 1996 by the Cubans of two small
planes belonging to the exile group Brothers to the Rescue. The two aircraft were
being used for propaganda activities, dropping leaflets over Cuba.

Montes also participated in creating a 1997 DIA assessment of Cuba's military
capacity. The conclusion of the DIA report was that Cuba was too weak since the
fall of the Soviet Union to present a
significant military threat to the United States. The Pentagon did not completely
agree with that assessment as is reflected in a May 1998 letter accompanying the
report that then-Defense Secretary William Cohen sent to members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee. Cohen wrote that while "the direct conventional threat by
the Cuban military has decreased, I remain concerned about the use of Cuba as a
base for intelligence activities directed against the United States … ."

The conclusion of the Pentagon's revised report, entitled "The Cuban Threat to U.S.
National Security" (go to www.defenselink.mil for the entire letter and report),
reinforces the notion that Cuba represents little conventional military threat to
the United States. But the last line states: "Nonetheless, Cuba has a limited
capability to engage in some military and intelligence activities which would be
detrimental to U.S. interests and which could pose a danger to U.S. citizens under
some circumstances."

Cuba, in the wake of September 11, was quick to dispel any
suggestions that it was involved in any hostile actions against the United States.
Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, told reporters that day, "We deeply
regret the loss of human life, and our position is of total rejection of this sort
of terrorist attack." Perez also said that "any idea of Cuban involvement, I don't
think that's even worth referring to. No one could be thinking such a barbarous
thing."

President Fidel Castro, in a speech on September 22, said "Cuba … is opposed to
terrorism and opposed to war. … Cuba reiterates its
willingness to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism."
He went on later in the speech to say, "Whatever happens, the territory of Cuba
will never be used for terrorist actions against
the American people and we will do everything within our reach to prevent such
actions against that people. Today we are expressing our solidarity while urging
peace and calmness."

The fact remains, however, that the U.S. Department of State lists Cuba among
countries that support terrorism, largely based
on accusations that both Basque and Colombian terrorists are allowed to live in the
country. And, in a statement released in early March 2002, the Bush administration
said that it was investigating Cuba's links to international terrorist groups, as
well as exploring
the possibility that Cuba had the means to disrupt U.S. military communications.
Some intelligence sources have speculated about the possibility that Cuba could
have passed sensitive information
on to other countries that are considered hostile to the United States, such as
Iran and Iraq. And they cite the Montes case as part of an underlying concern that
she could have had access to information about U.S. military deployments as the
country prepared
to attack Afghanistan. In a published report in late September, The Washington Post
cited FBI sources that explicitly said that concern was the reason for Montes'
arrest. But no official U.S. government source is pointing the finger at Cuba for
involvement in any terrorist activities directed at America.

The question still remains: why did Ana Belen Montes become a spy for Cuba?
"Most of these people recruit themselves," explains Dr. Jeffrey Richelson, an
intelligence expert and senior fellow at the nonprofit National Security Archive
and author of numerous books on foreign intelligence gathering, including A Century
of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. "I think in her case it's likely
that there was an
ideological affinity for the Cuban regime. From what I know, she always came down
on the softer side of U.S. policy towards Cuba."

That might be explained by what some investigators see in Montes' family history.
An account shared by Marcelo Fernandez-Zayas, a Cuban exile and writer of the
Web-based "Intelligence Report From Washington," indicates that when Montes was a
child, her mother appeared on a radio talk show and expressed sympathetic views of
the Castro regime. The response from a handful of Cuban exiles was critical, to say
the least. This had to have an effect on the young Ana Belen, Fernandez-Zayas and
others speculate. That and her mother's family history of participation in Puerto
Rico's socialist party, they add.

Everyone agrees that Montes' motives were not financial. The evidence so far shows
no large deposits into her bank account, nor any extravagant spending. Friends say
she was very focused on saving for retirement as a "single woman." Other friends
say there might have been some romantic connection that led Montes into the arms of
the Cubans. One friend recalls that Montes would go out dancing at clubs in the
Washington area where Cubans from the Interests Section would go. That, however,
seems to go against what most who knew Montes professionally believe. They describe
her as "dour" and "not particularly friendly." They argue that the reason Montes
became a spy has to be more about ideology and politics.

The other question to which an answer might never come is how U.S.
counterintelligence became suspicious enough to start looking at Montes. "There
could have been some evidence that the Cubans acted on some information Montes gave
them and the U.S. noticed and began looking for a leak," Richelson hypothesizes.
"Alternatively, there could have been a penetration of the Cuban [intelligence]
services by the U.S. that revealed her existence."

Finally, apart from showing the world once again that U.S. intelligence agencies
are highly penetrable, of what real use was Montes to the Cubans?

"It was probably of greater propaganda value to the Cubans in the intelligence area
in terms of their status within the rest of the Cuban government," says Richelson,
who believes that the damage Montes might have caused doesn't even approach what
Robert Hanssen did. Throughout the entire Montes case, the Cuban government, and
its representatives in Washington, declined to comment.

Others say the real prize in all this, little diminished by the
conviction of Montes, is the influence on attitudes of those in the U.S. political
establishment towards Cuba. The bottom line there is that the U.S. embargo is still
in effect, but emergency relief was allowed last year by the Bush administration
after a hurricane devastated parts of Cuba. How much will change now that the war
on terrorism seems likely to expand to other countries is anyone's guess.

The potential that fallout from the Montes case will hurt the Cubans probably
depends less on the story she told than the one truth that has pervaded the
relationship between Cuba and the United States: whenever either needs a bogeyman,
the other is always available.